Hands On: Harvest Moon Heroes

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The Wiimote is a hoe.

By Anoop Gantayat

The Harvest Moon series isn't exactly known for innovation. After all, the biggest thing Marvelous could think of for the latest DS installment was to add monsters to the mix while, curiously, limiting the use of the stylus.

With the Wii and the possibilities offered up by its motion-sensing controller, we were hoping to get a taste of an evolved Harvest Moon when we sampled the series' first Wii installment at the Nintendo World event in Nagoya this past weekend. What we got was some rather gimmicky uses of the controller, and the most boring demonstration at the show.

The Nintendo World demo was set up with three mini games, of which we were able to try one and observe the other. The one we watched while waiting in line had the player go about making friends with animals, who would then follow them around. Speak to a korobokle after making a party of four animals, and the demo came to an end.

That didn't seem too interesting, so we decided to try out the farming demo. This involved preparing a plot of land, then planting seeds, then watering it. It takes a few days for the seeds to become fruits, but we were able to use a nearby bench to advance the game's time system in hour or day increments. The demo came to an end when we took our first piece of fruit to a korobokle (one of the nature sprites that appears in all the Harvest Moon games).

The farming demo made limited use of the Wiimote. To use your hoe, you swing it back and forward. If you want to till more ground in one go, you can hold back on the controller for a few seconds, then swing forward. You'll instantly till a whole patch of land. The same goes for planting seeds and watering.

In practice, this control scheme was as fun as it sounds -- not much. But Marvelous managed to make things even worse by poor button placement for such frequent functionality as bringing up your items menu. On that note, it seems reasonable to expect to be able to use the Wiimote to point to new items, since the Wiimote is just sitting there most of the time. They're going to have to rethink these controls before the game's release.

Harvest Moon was, surprisingly, one of the best looking Wii games at the show, certainly a step up from what we've seen in the current generation from the series. A fully 3D countryside should make things a bit more interesting, but we hope the demo's farm-based gameplay isn't an indication of the Harvest Moon we'll be playing next year.